Rebrand Tenderloin for shoppers? No sale
There’s nothing I love (read: loathe) more than an arriviste marketing group trying to rename one of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. So let’s all take a moment to consider a global real estate firm’s current attempt to rebrand the Tenderloin as Union Square West.
Jones Lang LaSalle, JLL for short, recently released a report about Union Square West. There have been attempts to rebrand the Tenderloin before (the Urban Land Institute was roundly jeered for labeling the area Union Square West in 2013), but this time, JLL insists, is different.
San Francisco just keeps getting wealthier, and commercial rents in Union Square are just way too high. It’s time to explore a “new trade area” with a “new demographic.” The report, online at http://bit.ly/2eWhzwG, is clearly aimed at JLL’s client base of large multinational corporations like Hilton Worldwide and Siemens. It doesn’t mention the Tenderloin neighborhood.
Instead, it talks about the tenants touring Union Square “and West,” including Topshop, West Elm and Ralph Lauren. It enthuses about how “the demographic and psychographic profile of the 16-square-block area bound by Mason, Sutter, Jones and Market is shifting toward a consumer that loves art, design, craft cocktails and beer, live entertainment, and is eager and willing to pay premium prices for these things.” Here’s where I could start joking. Live entertainment in “Union Square West”? Are they thinking about Club Vixen, the New Century Theater, or the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre? Because the ladies and gentlemen who go to those establishments certainly report paying premium prices in their Yelp and Google reviews.
And everyone knows that alcohol, like other products, always costs more in low-income areas. So the people of the Tenderloin have been paying craft cocktail prices — without the craft — for a long time.
But the truth is that I don’t find something like this — an attempt at erasing a neighborhood’s name and history — to be all that funny.
Especially when we’re talking about a neighborhood like the Tenderloin.
Yup, the gritty, ugly, trash-strewn Tenderloin has a name and a story worth keeping. Because JLL supposedly provides research services, it might have thought about talking to the neighborhood’s residents about why the Tenderloin has up until now proved resistant to the likes of a West Elm.
“We have our own distinction,” said Del Seymour, director of Code Tenderloin. “We work hard to maintain our brand. We have little in common with our neighbors to the east.” He’s talking about Union Square, not Russia.
But the vast distance Seymour implies isn’t an exaggeration. The Tenderloin has a strong identity — a strong “brand” that goes back nearly as long as Union Square’s. Let’s start with the name.
“The Tenderloin got its name in the 1930s and ’40s, when it was the nightlife capital of the Bay Area,” said Katie Conry, program director for the Tenderloin Museum. “Police would brag that they could afford the finest cuts of meat because they were getting so many bribes by working in the Tenderloin.”
Nothing like a little vice and corruption to chase away the chain stores of the world.
To put it mildly, the Tenderloin’s never quite lost its reputation for those things — and a stroll down, say, Ellis Street from Jones to Larkin is a rapid reminder.
But it’s also the neighborhood where San Francisco’s famous values are the strongest.
“It’s historically been very accepting to people who didn’t fit in,” Conry said. “It was the gay neighborhood, and a lot of the city’s queer activism started here. Homeless youth who were flooding into the city in the 1960s found a place here. Then, during the Vietnam War era, a large number of Vietnamese refugees started their lives here. Because the Tenderloin historically has had a lot of affordable housing, it’s been the place where so many groups could get their start in San Francisco.”
Whatever’s left of those San Francisco’s values can still be found in the Tenderloin. It’s everywhere from Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the Tenderloin’s famed — and last — gay drag bar, to the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, which has quietly been helping young refugees since 1978. You can even find it in the Tenderloin’s existing “premium” businesses, like Farmer Brown, where owners Jay and Deanna Foster remember every customer’s name.
Can a West Elm compete with these kinds of values? Maybe in a neighborhood called Union Square West. But not in the Tenderloin.
Del Seymour, director of Code Tenderloin, on effort to rename neighborhood Union Square West “We have our own distinction. We have little in common with our neighbors to the east.”